I would imagine that auto manufacturers would get a huge initial sales boost for something like this as society converts over. But consider the ramifications:

Taxis and car rentals become fungible. You need a car, you call a number, and it appears 30 minutes later.

The proverbial "two car family" becomes "one car + on-call spare". Why sink tens of thousands in a car that you only use occasionally?

I expect car rental companies will grow, auto manufacturers will shrink (instead of selling X spare cars to families which are only occasionally used, they sell a much smaller Y spare cars to rental companies, which see a much higher usage rate).

Car rental companies who buy by the tens of thousands have more negotiating strength that the average person. That means a reduced profit margin for the manufacturer.

So between the drop in individual sales and the drop in profit margin, I expect the auto industry is going to be more competitive than before. "Competitive" does not usually make stockholders very happy.

Given the strategic position auto manufacturing has in national economies, expect bail-outs instead of bankruptcies. This will further hurt competitor's bottom-line.

Think the auto industry is cutthroat today? Just wait.

I was the first person at our office to try Ubuntu, way back in the Dapper Drake days. It spread like a virus so that pretty much all our Linux users were using Ubuntu. We even rolled it out to about 100 servers. But Canonical has ceased listening to what I need, and started telling me what I want. The best thing I can say about Unity is at least it isn't Gnome Shell.

So you see Canonical, it isn't me, it's you. Until you come to your senses, I'm sticking with Mint Debian edition. It has the Gnome 2 desktop like God intended. Rebuild the humanity icon pack and the Ambiance theme and your desktop can look exactly like the Ubuntu of olde, only minus the suck.

Until Ubuntu come to their senses and either ditches Unity or makes its usability and feature set on par with Gnome 2/MATE, that's where I'll be.

I'm with the group at Vanderbilt developing the storage filesystem for LSST, and it has some interesting challenges.

1. It requires redundancy at the server, rack, and site level. 2. Both data and metadata have to scale both in volume and in throughput (GB/sec or transactions/sec) separately of each other.
3. It has to work on the WAN level (GPFS & Lustre don't scale beyond the LAN yet).
4. It should optionally have HSM functionality so you can offload stuff to tape.
5. The data must be maintained in perpetuity so researchers years/decades from now can use it.
6. It must be portable across operating systems so Windows/Mac/Linux/etc users can all access the data.
7. All of this should be completely transparent to the user.
8. And it has to be done on the cheap (scientists definition of cheap, not CIO's definition).

Yeah, it can be (and is) being done. We're already using our filesystem to store 2+PB of data for the CERN CMS-HI experiment on commodity hardware. But I can tell you it is a substantially harder problem than you think.

According to three separate tests I have an IQ of 160, and I've spent most of my career working in academia. And believe me, intelligence is overrated. "Average" people are often a great deal smarter than they're given credit for.

And us "smart" guys can be dumber than a bag of hammers more often than we'd like to admit. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to be a victim of Dunning-Krueger syndrome. In academia, "I have a Ph.D." often translates into "I know everything about everything", usually with comic or tragic outcomes.

What I have seen, both in my personal and professional lives, that would make far more impact for society is finding the genes for discipline, for rationality, for work ethic, for compassion to others. Solve those, and you'll improve our society far more than trying to create a planet of Einstein's.

My friend lives in Atlanta. She has a TigerDirect, two Microcenters, and two Fry's.

I live in Nashville. We have Radio Shack, and Best Buy.

I don't understand why companies would rather beat each other senseless in fiercely competitive markets and completely ignore markets where they would *be* the market.

The whole "people go to Best Buy to shop and then buy online" thing is totally overblown. Yeah, I understand a real storefront costs a bit, so I don't mind paying a little extra, especially to have it *now*.

Best Buy's problem is that it isn't a 10-15% increase. It's often 200-400% increase. Golly shucks, I just can't understand why people go to Best Buy, look at price tags, and then buy somewhere else.

I meant to say...

When you say something is *important*, and yet treat it as unimportant, people are smart enough to see through that.

I can't find someone who'll sell me a Corvette for $10. That must mean there's a Corvette shortage...

The MBA's, pols, and lobbyists that run our society can't seem to understand that supply and demand applies to other people as well. If the reward for several years of grad school were equal to the risk and cost, you'd see more people in STEM. That's why they went into finance, because that's where the money was.

When the scientists and engineers make more money than the MBA's running the company, I'll imaging you won't have any problem finding them. (And I have both a MBA from a top 25 school and 12 years in high-performance computer. Guess who makes more around here...)

When you say something is unimportant, and yet treat it as unimportant, people are smart enough to see through that.

The world uses 83 million barrels per day. If they threw up 20 of those 1M tanks, it would only represent a few hours of world oil usage. And most of that capacity isn't used to "speculate", but for temporary storage for loading/unloading/processing. As your supply chain gets farther afield (deep sea, Venezuela, etc), you need to have more "cache" in the system to avoid disruptions.

I did not say speculation was impossible, simply that a) it was *much* harder than the average person understands and b) most "speculation" was simply the country that owns the oil leaving it in the ground on the belief that it would be worth more tomorrow. Goldman Sachs are a bunch of elementary-school pikers next to Saudi Aramco.

You're wasting your time. I've argued with roman_mir before. Either he's a professional troll out for lulz, or a walking, talking case of Dunning-Kruger. He is absolutely, utterly impervious to any facts which don't conform to how he thinks the world *should* work. And suggestions that perhaps he might want to read a book or two don't end well.

Supply is growing, but demand is growing faster. You do understand that supply-and-demand is about the imbalance between the two? As that imbalance grows, the price of oil will continue to climb.

America is no longer the primary driver of either the world economy as a oil, or the oil market. Again, you really need to open a newspaper and see how the world has changed the past 10 years.

You do understand that supply-and-demand applies to cash as well as oil? The US didn't "set" the Fed rate low. The world economy is awash with capital looking for a safe harbor, and relatively little demand for that capital. When the supply is high, and the demand is low, the price (in this case interest rate) falls. Conspiracy nuts have a hard time understanding that the Fed doesn't "set" the rate. It looks where the market has shot the arrow, and moves the target there.

Because that worthless Keynesian shamanism has proven remarkably adept at making predictions on inflation and growth on an economy against the zero-bound? Just because you personally don't like Keynes, doesn't make it any less right, any more than hating the fact that 2+2=4 will make it suddenly equal 5.

In the two threads I've followed you, you haven't been right yet. It's hard to tell whether you're actually a hard-headed idiot, or a remarkably advanced troll. If the latter, I solute you. Otherwise, may I suggest you spend some time reading about the Dunning-Kruger effect on Wikipedia? Because you seriously do not have a single clue.